Hey Dan,
This is a great question, and one that a lot of us working with
online transcripts and with non-standard Englishes constantly
face.
With a collection I was editing, working with writers from Asia,
Africa and Latin America, where the writers were not native
speakers and also not professionally used to writing, we faced a
similar dilemma which eventually, we resolved in the following
ways:
1. Except for when the syntax was so irregular that the citation
was unintelligible, we contacted the sources and checked if they
want to re-write it, or if our corrections were still representing
what they meant.
2. Like in oral ethnography projects, we retained the
irregularities of 'written speech', and we used that as a
precedence for retaining these 'errors'.
3. With different registers in the language, we retained them
without even high-lighting or italicising or pointing out those
irregularities, because that is a judgment call we did not want to
make, and we also thought that the onus of bias was on the reader.
Hope this helps resolve some of your queries,
Warm regards
Nishant
On 01-02-2014 19:21, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
I have a question for advice from this group that might have
political implications.
In an article I'm about to submit, I cite a number of discussions
on this list and humanist about the use of language, especially
English. The authors are both native English speakers and
non-native speakers and, as is typical in emails, there are a
number of small typos. solecisms, and the like.
Currently, I have a note at the first citation indicating that "as
is normal in as conversational a medium as email correspondence,
the quoted passages have small typographical errors and other
solecisms. These have not been corrected or otherwise noted." My
reason for this is that I don't want to put in a lot of sic or
corrections in square brackets. Although I'm a terrible typo
offender myself, the case can be more politicised it seems to me
when dealing with non-native speakers. I'm uncomfortable acting
either as judge or, worse, in my case, calling attention to
"errors"--especially since I think they are really more issues of
register than actual errors.
I could silently correct them, of course, as well, but I don't
like that either, in case what I think is an obvious correction
turns out to misrepresent something.
What do other people think? I've seen sic used before as a
form of ad hominem attack and so I generally really hate using it
if I can avoid it. But since it also seems nuts to pepper the
correspondence with square brackets (and since that could have the
same effect as a lot of sics), I don't want to do that either.
Is there a better solution than simply flagging the register
difference, as I currently do?
--
---
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada
+1 403 393-2539
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